Sarvam hits $1.5 billion valuation as India pushes for sovereign AI

Sarvam has raised $234 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, the company announced on Monday. The funding round was led by HCLTech (the IT subsidiary of Indian conglomerate HCL Group), which is investing $150 million. Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in the round alongside existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. The startup hopes to raise a total of $300 million for its Series B round. This investment comes more than two years after Sarvam raised $41 million across its seed and Series A rounds, and follows the startup’s launch of its models in 30 billion- and 105 billion-parameters earlier this year.

The startup is scaling its deployments across multiple sectors, with its technology currently supporting the following operations:

• Conversational AI: More than 2 million daily interactions.
• Inference: Roughly 10 million daily API calls.
• Speech Transcription: More than 500,000 hours of audio transcribed monthly.
• Document Digitization: More than 35 million pages of records digitized.
• Agriculture: Data collected from 17 million farmers for the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare.
• Insurance: Support for 45 million policyholders.
• Fintech: Support for a sales force of more than 350,000 employees.

This funding arrives as India seeks to develop sovereign AI capabilities to reduce reliance on foreign-controlled infrastructure. The debate over AI sovereignty gained fresh urgency last week when Anthropic disabled access to its latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, following a U.S. government order, citing national security concerns. While both OpenAI and Anthropic view India as their second-largest market after the U.S., high computing costs and limited access to capital have made it difficult for Indian startups to compete with rivals in the U.S. and China. Sarvam is among a small group of companies attempting to build homegrown foundation models and a full-stack AI business.

Sarvam was founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who previously worked at AI4Bharat (an Indian-language AI research initiative at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras) backed by technology veteran Nandan Nilekani. With the new capital, the startup plans to fund research into its AI models focused on agentic, coding, and cybersecurity applications. “Our ambition is to diffuse this technology widely in India, creating significant value across sectors for citizens, small businesses, enterprises, and state and central governments,” Raghavan said.

Why it matters

Sarvam’s unicorn status underscores the urgent push for sovereign AI in India, as companies and governments seek alternatives to foreign-controlled computing infrastructure.